Field of the Invention
The present disclosure is directed to the field of integrated circuit design and more particularly to designing or making an integrated circuit design block based at least in part on an H/V demand ratio for that design block.
Description of Related Art
Time-to-market and manufacturing cost may be key factors in the success of modern electronic products, such as digital cameras, video disc players, and personal computers. Short time-to-market may allow an electronic product to be responsive to consumer desires and market trends, thus tending to improve the market success of the electronic product. Low manufacturing cost may allow a product manufacturer to reduce a product's selling price while maintaining a reasonable profit margin on each unit sold.
The time-to-market and manufacturing cost of an electronic product may be heavily influenced by the development time and manufacturing cost of individual components in the electronic product. Integrated circuits (“ICs”) are common components in modern electronic products, and ICs are known to involve substantial development time and manufacturing cost. Thus, keeping the development time and manufacturing cost of ICs low may be beneficial to the market success of an electronic product incorporating such ICs.
Prior to the present invention, substantial inefficiencies in the IC design process led to long development times and high manufacturing costs for ICs. Although synthesis, coupled with cell placement and routing, offers development time and cost benefits relative to non-synthesized designs, many ICs incorporating synthesis in their design process may fall to realize their full potential for fast time-to-market or low manufacturing cost because existing software tools for synthesizing blocks are unable to accurately estimate the wiring demands for connecting logic gates within a block. As a result, design engineers are often forced to manually estimate the area needed for internal wiring.
These manual internal wiring estimates take considerable engineering effort and often lead to under-estimation or over-estimation of the area needed for wiring. Over-estimation of wiring area may lead to ICs that are uneconomical to manufacture or ICs that require time-consuming design iterations to become economical to manufacture, thereby increasing time-to-market. Under-estimation of wiring area may lead to ICs that cannot be synthesized because inadequate internal wiring resources are available to establish necessary connections between logic gates. As a result, time-consuming design iterations are needed, thereby increasing time-to-market for the IC. Under-utilization of available wiring resources also resulted from cell placement techniques prior to the present invention, leading to higher manufacturing cost for the IC.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods of designing and making ICs in a way that accurately considers wiring demands and efficiently utilizes available wiring resources, thereby allowing ICs to achieve fast time-to-market and low manufacturing cost.